The In-store Pricing System delivered a new label printing system for B&Q.
The new system improves the efficiency of store label generation allowing
a higher volume of price changes per week. The solution was based on the Episys
Retail Enterprise Suite an Enterprise Java solution. Price, Article and
company hierarchy interfaces were developed on top of MQ from SAP, whilst
a pair of web service interfaces were developed to support the store RF Guns
to allow ad-hoc label requests at the shelf-edge and to track store stock
movements. The presence of individual store stocking information allows batches
of labels to be printed in store walk order greatly reducing the amount of
time required to label the individual store. A Java applet handles the printing
allowing the print stream to be centrally rendered and passed in a heavily
compressed form to the individual client machines. In addition the platform
supports PDA devices and hip-printers allowing for future printing of labels
directly at the shelf edge, queue busting and so on.

As part of this project Charles:

Acted as the B&Q design authority on the project.

Co-authored the Detailed Technical Design for the solution
with Episys.

Wrote the specifications for the MQ and ETL data take-on
programs.

Coordinated the development effort across the different
suppliers and in-house teams.

The solution was rolled out across the B&Q store estate in December 2006.
It supports a user population of around 14,000

IPS Batch Monitoring Application

Following on from the successful implementation of the In-store Pricing solution,
B&Q asked Charles to write a utility to automatically check the status
of the batch and store web applications. This was delivered to B&Q in
June 2007. The Checking application is written as a stand-alone command line
Java (J2SE) application running on AIX and scheduled using CRON. It performs
checks against the database to ascertain the state of the last
batch run, and also makes sure that the web application login page can be
reached, that there is enough disk space available for pre-rendering labels
and reports on the central server, and that the batch process is running.
Once the checks have been completed, an Excel report is generated and emailed to the relevant support
teams.
The main APIs used are: JDBC with Oracle, Java Mail and Logging, Jakarta
Commons HttpClient, Apache POI.

Store Task Manager

The B&Q Store Task Manager project delivered a structured workflow for in-store
assignments. Previously tasks were assigned to store managers via email to a
generic and very busy store inbox. Although rules-based processing could have
helped, B&Q decided on a more fundamental change and, following a successful
pilot in 55 stores in January 2005, rolled out Store Task Manager across its
entire operation - around 350 stores - completing the roll-out in March (approx
3000 users).

This Java Enterprise (JEE) based system is based on a browser-based workflow
tool called Precision Workflow Management from Reflexis.
One significant advantage of the new system is that feedback and alerting
to head office are automatically built-in, so the head office team can monitor
when a project has been actioned. This has proved particularly effective when
dealing with preparations for external range reviews within a store, for example.

Charles' responsibilities included:

Management of relationship between B&Q and the vendor

Management of internal resources and co-ordination of activities during
development and testing cycles

Delivery of technical, performance and security testing for the application

Working with the system test team to analyse complex problems, notably
during performance testing, suggesting potential fixes and allocating these
to appropriate development teams

Working alongside the third party application developers to deliver code
fix and unit / system testing during UAT

Review and QA of all functional and technical design documents

Preparation of technical environments and data set-up

Development of support model and training material for handover of the
application to the Systems support teams

The project saw an estimated cost saving of £1m a year. It subsequently
won "Best in IT/Business Alignment" at the 7th Annual Retail Systems
Achievement Awards.